Life in another language

Literary Review, Fall, 2003 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Garrison Keillor, who spent a lot of time in Denmark, once said, "No Dane would look you in the eye and say, 'This is a great country.' You are supposed to figure that out for yourself." I think it is a great country. And that's why I'm still here, nearly half a life-time after migrating to Europe from my home in the United States. I've lived in France and travelled frequently throughout much of Europe and elsewhere, but my home-base since the mid '70s has been Denmark, even if I am still an American citizen, still vote and files taxes in the US--as well as here.

The expatriate life, for me, has been a good one, although it does complicate one's identity. There is no doubt that living in another country, more importantly in another language, changes your view of things. I know that I will never become completely Danish, yet somehow I also know that I am not quite completely American anymore either. And just as I could never find it in my heart to surrender my American citizenship, I don't think I could bear to leave Copenhagen for more than the few visits I make to the States each year.

As a writer I worked for years in the US and never published a thing. Not until I had been living in Denmark for a while did I begin to write things that interested American publishers. And I think this was at least partly thanks to the opportunity of viewing my native culture through the lens of the new one--because I was still writing fiction about American characters in American settings. Only after my fifth book of fiction did I venture to set a novel in Denmark and include Danes among the characters--a challenging and liberating experience, casting Danish sensibilities into English. The novel I've just finished is through the eyes of a Chilean torture survivor and a 40-year-old Danish woman, who is the book's central consciousness--I don't know what that might say about the changes I've been going through.

I was born in New York City, in Queens, but travelled and lived a good deal around the US before leaving. The atmosphere in which I grew up was one of repression--the '50s and early '60s, a time when apartheid was official policy in some states, unofficial in others, a time of fear--fear of communism, of nuclear invasion, racial integration, sexual liberty, even of language.

Books were routinely banned. The novels of Henry Miller were contraband, as was D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Even if Joyce's Ulysses--thanks to Bennet Cerf and a US District Judge named Woolsey--had been legal since 1933, no American publisher was willing to take a chance on J. P. Donleavy's wonderfully funny The Ginger Man, inspired by, though far milder than, Joyce's masterwork. Aristotle once advised, "The word dog does not bite," but in the America of my youth the word "fuck" could land you in jail--as people like Lenny Bruce and the San Francisco woman who published a poem entitled "To Fuck with Love" would learn, even if it and other assorted illegal words were in daily use in the popular vocabulary. In Berkely, in 1964, there was even a movement whose adherents wore signs on their chests proclaiming, "Fuck, Verb," in protest against this unconstitutional prohibition of free speech.

As the 1960s progressed, many gains were made against such narrow-minded fear of language, free expression, thought, the human body, and politics left of Barry Goldwater. Films like Dr. Strangelove and books like Candy (originally banned even in France) won the war with laughter. Legislators struggled with definitions of pornography--how to ensure freedom of speech without opening the gate to pornography? Eventually, the impossibility of doing so was recognized. Freedom of expression is freedom of expression. For a time it seemed as though the concept of liberty was breaking through the shell of repressive fear in a society that insisted it practised "liberty and justice for all"--though liberty and justice were reserved primarily for certain classes of the so-called "classless" American society.

And in some ways freedom of expression has triumphed, although speech-control and mind-control take many forms. As noted in a recent New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik, "After the Kennedy assassination the great divide began in which America turned to the right politically while becoming increasingly liberated in its personal manner. By the time Ronald Reagan was President, you could say 'cocksucker' in any comedy club in Philadelphia ..." Striking that this observation should appear in the pages of a magazine that a mere 20 years ago was adamantly committed to keeping any such word from its pages. Today, a rapper is free to spout the word fuck at the speed of frustration, while book and curricula content is controlled by school boards and funding agencies, and professors and school teachers may face serious consequences for certain utterances, for teaching certain books, for risking the wrath of harrassment charges (over something as innocent as hanging the painting of a nude on your office wall).